Workshop on improving Internet access

Mountain View County (MVC) staff are arranging a workshop to learn how a local provider can improve Internet access for residents and businesses.

It's expected to include representatives of major towns in MVC as well as representatives of adjoining counties like Clearwater, Rocky View, Red Deer and Kneehill.

MVC council agreed to host that workshop after hearing a presentation July 6 from Chris Thompson, assistant manager of Olds-based O-NET.

Thompson said many county residents and businesses are missing out on possible business and/or business expansion opportunities, due to a lack of Internet access capacity in some parts of the county.

He noted O-NET, the community-owned Internet, phone and cable TV provider in Olds, has the fastest Internet download speeds in the country, more than twice that of Airdrie, for example.

Thompson also pointed out that via fibre connections, O-NET is not only serving more than 1,100 residential properties and 250 business customers in Olds, but also serving markets in Sundre and Linden and even Waterton National Park, in conjunction with the Waterton Community Network.

Deputy Reeve Patricia McKean agrees there's a need to improve Internet service within portions of Mountain View County alone.

“The west part of Mountain View County has a lot of dead spots and no Internet service out there for people, like west of Sundre, west of Cremona. Typically, west of (Highway) 22 is where service becomes really poor,” McKean says.

“A lot of the businesses we have that can't access it are kind of at a (disadvantage) to the rest of them, so we want to be able to provide the same access,” McKean adds.

She figures the workshop will be held some time this fall, because it will be difficult to get everyone together before then, due to summer holidays.

McKean is excited about what the workshop might do for rural Internet access.

“I think there is lots of opportunity for it, so I think it will be good for everybody,” she says.

Thompson says it's time to have that discussion for two reasons.

One is that millennials are now starting to come into the workforce, and they have different expectations of the Internet than the generations before them.

“These are people who are now starting to enter the workforce who have grown up with technology,” Thompson says.

“With that I think comes more of an expectation of quality Internet connectivity versus a nice-to-have quality of Internet connectivity. So this millennial generation is definitely going to have an effect on the broadband requirements as consumers go.”

Secondly, Thompson says, Mountain View County is within easy commuting distance of places like Calgary and Red Deer. He says top quality Internet service could attract residents and businesses to the area and thus spur the local economy.

“I didn't go to the council saying, ‘here's what we need to do about it.' My message was ‘to do nothing is a mistake, so let's put our heads together and try to come up with solutions that inevitably help this move in a forward direction,'” he says.

Thompson is pleased with the decision to set up the workshop.

I think that the level of interest was good. And I do believe that they recognize that this is something that we need to talk about,” he says.

“I think the idea of getting those stakeholders together to start talking through how we're going to address this is exactly what I was hoping for.”